The invention relates generally to devices for handling flexible bagged products such as potato chips and, more particularly, it concerns an improved apparatus for automatically packing flexible bagged products such as potato chips into a carton or case for handling.
The efficient handling of bags of breakable product such as potato chips or corn chips has long been a problem to the makers of such product. To assist such handling, there has been developed a collating unit for bagged products and the like which is the subject of my U.S. Pat. No. 4,356,906. This patent is incorporated herein by reference for the purpose of setting forth a suitable apparatus for supplying collated product in units in a vertical orientation.
While the provision of a machine which can collate and collect flexible bagged products in a vertical orientation is believed to be a significant development in the handling of such product, there still exists the need to move the product from the place of vertical collation into packing cases. At the same time, the movement of the bags into the cases must be accomplished without harm to the contents of the bags. At present, such packing of the bags into cases is believed to be done manually by physically picking up the bags from a collecting platform and inserting the bags into a case.
It is therefore desirable to provide an apparatus which automatically collects and loads flexible bagged products into cartons. Because the cartons for such products will often have room for more than one row of product, such an apparatus should, preferably, also be capable of sequentially collecting a plurality of units or product in a row for the loading of sequential rows of product into a carton.